Personalisation and CRM

Personalisation has been utilised by various companies in the electronic marketplace. Gartner research stated that by 2004, 80 per cent of content-rich IT applications (eg news sites, e-tailers and corporate intranets) will incorporate personalisation. Personalisation is becoming more of an increasing segment of the internet economy. Customer relationship management (CRM) has been an accepted strategy of companies in order to improve their performance. The concept of personalisation and CRM has expanded in scope to emphasise a much broader notion of benefits to a company. The focus of this paper is to determine whether companies can increase the return generated by their electronic commerce strategy by utilising ‘personalisation’ in executing CRM in the electronic marketplace. A case-study approach was utilised to identify personalisation strategies and its benefits. Lessons learned from the cases examined revealed that companies should approach personalisation from an inter-functional as opposed to a ‘silo’ implementation to reap maximal benefits. Our research found that competitive pressures and cost savings helped to spurn the use of personalisation. Personalisation requires ‘anticipating relevant intent’ of customers in order to increase benefits. Other key findings identified that companies, both business to business (b2b) and business to consumers (b2c), employing personalisation improves the benefits of CRM.